Ray Kurzweil Responds

You may not have followed the discussion that ensued when Ray Kurzweil was reported to 'not understand the brain', but it's pretty fascinating. Here's what PZ Meyers said:

"There he goes again, making up nonsense and making ridiculous claims that have no relationship to reality. Ray Kurzweil must be able to spin out a good line of bafflegab, because he seems to have the tech media convinced that he's a genius, when he's actually just another Deepak Chopra for the computer science cognoscenti." (fromPZ eyers)

Ouch!

Here's a typically articulate and persuasive rebuttal from Ray Kurzweil:

"Myers, who apparently based his second-hand comments on erroneous press reports (he wasn’t at my talk), goes on to claim that my thesis is that we will reverse-engineer the brain from the genome. This is not at all what I said in my presentation to the Singularity Summit. I explicitly said that our quest to understand the principles of operation of the brain is based on many types of studies — from detailed molecular studies of individual neurons, to scans of neural connection patterns, to studies of the function of neural clusters, and many other approaches. I did not present studying the genome as even part of the strategy for reverse-engineering the brain." (fromRay Kurzweil)